When it became clear in early June that the St. Louis Cardinals would lap the rest of the Central Division, baseball observers began asking two fundamental questions about the team’s fitness for postseason play.

The first dealt with their starting pitching. Comprised of five no. 3 starters, the Cards’ rotation was ideally suited for the long regular season, but appeared inadequate for October. Their performance against Boston so far bears this out. Neither Woody Williams nor Matt Morris lasted five innings against the Red Sox offense, and tellingly, Sox hitters swung and missed at only 14 pitches in those two games.

The second concern was that the offense was too reliant on a few hitters. In a typical Cardinals regular season win, the starting pitcher threw five or six decent innings while Albert Pujols, Jim Edmonds, and Scott Rolen, each of them among the five or six best hitters in the league this year, bashed the other team into submission.

The big three were enough to make an otherwise mediocre offense the best in the National League, but the concern was that should one or two of them slump or run into a poor matchup, they would drag the entire offense down. The seemingly superfluous acquisition of Larry Walker in August was a shrewd hedge against this possibility; but even with the former Rockies MVP in the fold, the concerns expressed about the Redbirds’ depth seem well founded.

Beginning with Astros starter Brandon Backe’s implausible Game 5 performance in Houston, the St. Louis offense has, if not imploded, been sketchy at best. Over five games, the Cardinals have scored 22 runs, nine of them in Game 1 of the World Series. Over that span, the fourth and fifth hitters, Rolen and Edmonds, have gone a combined 7-for-40, negating much of the value of Pujols’s otherworldly performance.

Granted, the no. 4 and 5 hitters have managed some key hits – Edmonds hit a walk-off home run in Game 6 of the NLCS, and Rolen’s homer off Roger Clemens won the decisive Game 7. But without these two hitting at their accustomed level, the Cardinals are looking nothing like the team that ran wild over the National League this summer.

Curiously, manager Tony LaRussa insists on compounding the issue by putting even more bad hitters on the field. He has one good bat on his bench, John Mabry, who hit .296 AVG/.363 OBA/.504 SLG with 13 home runs in only 240 at bats this year. Instead of doing the simple and logical thing and putting Mabry at designated hitter in Fenway Park, LaRussa used the extra lineup spot to play So Taguchi and Marlon Anderson. Mabry never left the bench.

The logic behind these moves – batting the relatively speedy Taguchi and Anderson ninth is meant to create, in effect, a second leadoff spot so more runners will be on for the sluggers – just isn’t compelling. Taguchi’s on-base average this year was .337; Anderson’s was .269.The speed of neither could make up for the difference between their bats and that of Mabry.

With Tony Womack limited by multiple injuries and catcher Mike Matheny, a defensive specialist, putting up a miserable batting line of .205 AVG/.214 OBA/.282 SLG in the postseason, the Cards are already playing with a short offensive sequence. Putting in lesser bats than Mabry’s just compounds the damage, and makes any failures by the big four all the more critical. If the Series gets back to Fenway, it will be imperative that LaRussa put his best hitters at bat.

In the meantime, there’s little he can do but hope that his big hitters come around. Edmonds’s home/road splits this year (he hit for a .989 OPS on the road against a staggering 1.131 at home) give some reason to think he might break out of his slump. But there’s little reason to think Rolen will.

The difference in the third baseman’s home and road performance is even more dramatic than that of Edmonds – although not in the Cardinals’ favor. Rolen’s road OPS was 1.156 this season; at Busch, it was only .866. More worrisome for the Cards, Rolen still seems to be plagued by the leg injuries that caused him to miss much of the last month of the season. Though he has hit several dramatic home runs over the last few weeks, he has done little else, and is generating little torque with his swing.

It’s unlikely that Jeff Suppan or Jason Marquis will succeed in holding down a Red Sox offense that was dominant all year and has, if anything, been playing at a new level in October. Neither pitcher is all that different from Morris and Williams, both of whom the Sox crushed. With Rolen looking like he might never be a force in this series, the pressure is on Edmonds and Walker to back up Pujols and turn Games 3 and 4 into battles of the bullpens.

The problem for the Cardinals is that the Red Sox do have pitchers who can shut any team down, and they have one going tonight. Pedro Martinez is not Tim Wakefield, and he is not going to get hammered by the scrubs at the bottom of the St. Louis lineup. If the Cardinals want to make this a series, they’ll have to do it on the backs of the hitters who brought them this far.